Valve wants to hire everyone. Or at least, it would if everyone conformed to an incredibly specific set of creative standards and sported brains heaving with so much intelligence that nearby rodents exploded into academic journals at mere exposure to their thoughts. Unsurprisingly, Valve tends to focus on those with tremendous amounts of previous experience and reports of startlingly low rodent populations in their wake. Valve Pipeline, however, is the antithesis of that. The game wearer (and maker) of many hats is attempting to cultivate its own crop by sucking the brightest minds of tomorrow into its oozing brain tubules.

The website’s aim is to give teenagers a look behind-the-scenes of Valve’s process, with updates coming from high-school-age interns. Here’s Valve’s explanation:

“There are two main reasons that Valve is creating Pipeline. The first is that we are frequently asked questions by teenagers about the videogame industry. ‘What is it like to work on videogames? What should I study? What colleges are best for preparing me? How do I get a job in videogames?’ Pipeline will be a place where those questions can be discussed.”

“The second is that Valve is running an experiment. Traditionally Valve has been a very good place for very experienced videogame developers, and not so good at teaching people straight out of school (the reasons for this and the tradeoffs are covered in the Valve employee handbook). Pipeline is an experiment to see if we can take a group of high school students with minimal work experience and train them in the skills and methods necessary to be successful at a company like Valve.”

And then Valve will open up a school in which Gabe Newell and a cast of lovably curmudgeonly professors will teach wise-cracking students valuable lessons about both game development and life. There will be copious shenanigans, musicals, and still no Half-Life 3.

Seriously though, more information will be available “within the next month or so”. I think Pipeline’s goal is admirable too – though again, Valve is said to march to the beat of its own drum, no matter whichversion of that story you buy. Will the knowledge students mine from this database be applicable elsewhere? Hopefully. But now, onto real issues: Goodness, some of those teenagers had horrendous posture. The future is coming, and it has severe spinal problems at age 25.

Oh to be a teenager in this day and age. The possibilities are endless!!

Then again, when I was a teenager in the 80s I would have have plenty of opportunities. Instead I spend all my days playing on my Commodore 64 and climbing trees! (though not at the same time I might add)

Yeah I basically thought, oh lucky them, then I remembered, not so lucky me, as I grew up at a time when you could make games and figure it out as you go while still being reasonably successful, I missed the bandwagon by a long shot… though I figured it would have been best to be in your late teens in the 80’s, so I was a little young as I was still < 10. Ah well :)

I suppose those kids have talent and merit to be chosen, but god damn are they lucky!?

To get a chance to learn by one the biggest companies in gaming industry (are they not THE biggest now, actually, with Steam and all?), at that age? To jump directly into the concrete, rather than learn shit-tons of theory stuff in university… Damn! (Yes, i know theory stuff is important, it’s also a waste of time mostly tho, unless you wonna work in Research)

Those kids are just awesome. There’s an unconsciously awkward one, one that just does not give a fuck, one that seems somewhat drowned by his surroundings, one hyper earnest , one overly confident, and the sensible one who you know is going to be trouble in a few years time… It’s like they had a checklist :)

Those kids are just awesome. There’s an unconsciously awkward one, one that just does not give a fuck, one that seems somewhat drowned by his surroundings, one hyper earnest , one overly confident, and the sensible one who you just know is going to be trouble in a few years time… It’s like they had a checklist :)

Funny, I always thought it was cool that I lived so close to Valve, yet would never be able to intern with them. Suddenly, this project pops up, 90% of which are kids from my school. Funny how that goes.

Yea… would be good after spending god-knows-how-long on making new hats/gloves and other weird items… though recently they don’t even do that – most of the content releases are just stuff from the community. Thank god some good stuff happens from time to time (like new heroes) but that’s still a rarity that hardly adds any new functionalities to the game at all.

I am not sure if this is sarcasm or something actually good said about the U.S. on RPS.

Certainly there are a lot of positives about jobs in the U.S. still, but, as an American myself, we rarely hear about them even from our own media anymore. Recently our news has been filled with stories about immigration (as our Congress tries to pass a new immigration law) and how we have so few jobs to offer that most immigration from Mexico has stopped anyway…legal and illegal.

So yeah, your comment is a totally different slant than we have gotten lately.

I do share a lot of the unpleasant opinions about Americans (and I would argue at length for many of them) but I’ve also seen how many brilliant people are there. As someone living in the back end of Europe, I can only dream about progressive groups like Valve, or creative mammoths like them or Obsidian. We have Ubisoft, Gameloft and EA mobile here, but they all answer to their bosses outside and none can comprise an independent and rebellious studio like, for example, our neighbors in Poland with CDPR. So, yeah, the US is still eons ahead to what I can hope to see here.

THIS. This might be more useful in helping guide kids into a career in the hard sciences – like computer science/math which is important and sorely needed in this country. So…hooray for that. But how about 20 somethings who are struggling with debt who may be talented story tellers, have some basic background in programming, or good artists AND have some college under their belt. Or – god forbid – 30 somethings and beyond who want to change careers or are unemployed. Like I said at the beginning though, if this just introduces a handful of kids to how amazing a career in computer science or math can be – this will have been successful.

I have no idea what the heck Valve is up to these days. Seems like they have no idea how they’re going to grow and rampant diversification, while under the guise of a flat management system, seems ludicrously silly.

Hopefully this is about donating time and resources into programs or schools instead of seeing if they can turn five Seattle area youths into ideal Valve recruits. Maybe I’m just having a hard time getting the combine out of my head though.